Friday, March 27, 2015

To
reassure wealthy clients, Christina Alvarez Mancini invented a jet-setting
British owner for her Napa Valley wine collection service. Success has brought
her close to buying her own winery, when irregularities at a London wine
auction threaten her business.

A
man in love with a good plan.

Stig,
an immortal Viking thief, knows he’s found the perfect role. The California
woman who created his character won’t discover what he’s up to in England until
after he’s pocketed the money he needs. Then Christina walks into the auction
preview, ready to ruin his plans, and he knows his boredom has ended.

Secrets
that turn deadly.

By
the end of the night, these two rivals must cooperate to escape kidnappers,
British authorities, media and a pair of mysterious watchers. That’s when a
game Stig’s played for a thousand years puts Christina’s life at risk.

Can
two people whose identities are based on lies trust each other enough to
survive?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

EXCERPT:

Because
Stig thought he and Christina were in the clear, free of the men who tracked
them from London to France, he let his guard down. Big mistake.

Pounding
his fist on the steering wheel wasn’t going to get them out of here, but it
might keep him from letting out a string of gutter profanity in front of
Christina. “Who are those guys?”

“How
should I know?” She twisted to try to look out the rear windshield. “You’re the
fugitive. They have to be following you.”

If
the men from the train had followed them out of Calais, there must be a
tracking device. He wasn’t carrying a phone, and Skafe had taken Christina’s at
Bodeby’s, so it wasn’t mobile phone signals. The car was a random choice, too
down-market for fancy factory locating devices, thus it should be clean. “Get
the black duffel.”

She
struggled to reach between the seats and yank the bag forward while he
monitored the other car. It stayed back, but he was certain the circular
headlights were his and the silhouette fit. The even distance between the two
cars didn’t alter as he lowered the passenger side’s electric window. Freezing
wind emphasized how screwed they were. He had to yell to be heard. “Anything
that’s not from my flat or your personal items, throw it out.”

“What?”
she yelled back.

Ivar,
Wend and Skafe were known quantities, but he didn’t like having players he
couldn’t identify moving around the board. “They’re tracking us, so get rid of
their shit. All of it. Including the bag.”

It
went. Random toiletries, a pair of black socks, a paperback book. And then the
bag. She was left with the purple dress, the blond wig, her purse and his old
fire medic pouch in a heap on her lap.

“Now
you can add littering to the tally of my transgressions I know you’re keeping.”

“Do
you joke about everything?” Her hands clutched her purse and his old satchel,
even though it no longer held the bottle of Perlus.

“If
you’d lived as long as I have, you’d realize humor is the only way to get
through your five hundred thousandth day.” Even dark humor beat despair over
the isolation forced on him by eternal life.

She
sighed. “Trying to distract me with your immortal story? I was hoping for a
better one, or, heaven forbid, a plan.”

“We
could assume they’re tracking the car and steal a fourth one.”

“Isn’t
crazy defined as doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different
result?”

“That’s
me. Crazy.” Clearly he could recount the complete story of Beowulf’s crew,
shoot himself a couple more times for emphasis and receive no more than a few
tuts and raised eyebrows. Rarely had honesty had such a complete lack of
success. It goaded him. “We could go to a hotel, strip search each other for
tracking chips and do a full body scan to find the implants aliens put on us
while we were unconscious. What do you say to that idea?”

“The
hotel part sounds good, because I really need to shower and sleep, but the
search for tracking chips part reminds me of gorilla grooming.”

He
gripped the wheel hard with both hands before making his real suggestion, risky
only to her, a plan he couldn’t implement unless she agreed. “What if we ram
them off the road into a ditch?”

She
didn’t contradict the idea.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Anna lives with
her quietly funny Canadian husband and two less quiet children in a century-old
house in Seattle. The perpetual drizzle is a good excuse to drink more coffee.
She’s a former US Army officer who now writes The Immortal Vikings series from
Carina Press and also the author of His Road Home, a novella which Publishers
Weekly called “Tantalizing … a raw, emotional story” and the website
SmartB*tchesTrashyBooks gave an A rating.

She donates a
portion of her book proceeds to two charities: the Fisher House Foundation,
which provides housing for families of wounded soldiers in the US and Great
Britain, and Doctors Without Borders, which delivers emergency medical care in
more than sixty crisis zones world-wide.

To sign up for
Anna's newsletter, find out more about her books, and read longer excerpts,
please visit her website at www.annarichland.com.

Anna will be awarding a set of En
Route notecards, gorgeously illustrated by Kate Pocrass (because falling in
love with an Immortal Viking is a wild journey!) to a randomly drawn winner
(INTERNATIONAL) via rafflecopter during the tour.

Thanks for posting excerpts from The Second Lie! It's been fun being on tour, and now I get to give away prizes (and go to the post office). Love it!

I also have a giveaway of a paperback copy of the first book in the series, FIRST TO BURN, going on now at goodreads - but it's for UK only. And the author Cecilia Grant is giving away a copy of my Rita-nominated novella, HIS ROAD HOME, at her blog. So tons of giveaways!

Thanks for stopping in to read -- the beginning of the story is on my website.